Visual Arts joins new downtown studio

by | Apr 2, 2026 | Faculty, Graduate, indigenous, News, Research, Visual Arts

We’re excited that UVic’s Visual Arts department is part of Victoria’s newest collective studio and gallery space: The Hourglass. Developed by Vancouver Island Visual Arts Society (who also run downtown’s ambitious 80-artist Rockslide Gallery), with support from the City of Victoria’s Storefront Activation Program, Hourglass is an 8,500-square-foot space housed in the former Volvo dealership at Yates and Cook, now repurposed to house 18 art studios and an exhibition space.

Visual Arts professors Heather Igloliorte (Canada Research Excellence Chair in Decolonial & Transformational Indigenous Art Practices) and Joel Ong (Canada Research Chair in Emergent Digital Art Practices), along with three graduate students, will have dedicated studios in the Hourglass.

“Having studio and presentation space at the Hourglass studios gives us a place to create and a place to connect,” says Visual Arts chair Megan Dickie. “We’re excited to build stronger ties with the Victoria arts community and to see MFA students working alongside our new faculty.”

Visual Arts will also maintain a small project space in the building to share work by students, instructors and community members: the first public presentation was the group exhibition The Work Yet to Come, which ran March 27-29 and featured the work of eight early-career Indigenous student artists.

One of the grad student studios

Like so many arts spaces in Victoria — including the bustling Rockslide itself — the Hourglass location is destined to be short-lived, as the property is slated for redevelopment into a 21-storey mixed-use tower over the next few years. But until then, it will serve as the city’s latest innovative arts space.

Follow the Hourglass here

A Bridge Between Two Worlds: Kirk McNally’s new ADCARA role

by | Jan 16, 2026 | Art History & Visual Studies, Award, Faculty, Graduate, indigenous, News, Orion Series in Fine Arts, Research, School of Music, Theatre, Visual Arts, Writing

While new hires are a regular part of faculty life, it’s rare that we see the creation of entirely new administrative roles. One of the Faculty highlights of 2025 was the inauguration of two brand-new Associate Dean positions: Associate Dean Indigenous, held by Writing professor Danielle Geller, and Associate Dean Creative Activity, Research and Administration (ADCARA), held by School of Music professor Kirk McNally.

A professional sound engineer, McNally is a familiar face at faculty meetings: he first joined our School of Music in 2006 along with the then-new Music & Computer Science program before being appointed a professor of music technology in 2016; his own research and creative work has been supported by the likes of SSHRC, the Canada Council, the Banff Centre and UVic’s Learning & Teaching Centre, among others. In 2025, McNally was awarded the UVic Provost’s Advocacy & Activism Award in Equity, Diversity and Inclusion for his efforts to host a diverse range of musicians and fostering a vibrant learning environment for aspiring sound engineers and producers.

Now, as our inaugural ADCARA, McNally’s role focuses on a number of linked priorities, including,

  • external grants and awards support and advocacy, and strategic positioning of faculty
  • advocacy for Fine Arts via different UVic councils and committees
  • undertaking various strategic initiatives around collaboration, both on and off campus, and
  • graduate student curriculum support and development of new grad student initiatives and collaborations.

Boil it down, and McNally sees the ADCARA position as a means of promoting, supporting and benefiting Fine Arts as a whole.

“It’s about representation within different committees and at different levels, both across the university and at the community level,” he explains. “We’re clearly acknowledged as a Faculty within the university, but we don’t always have a voice to negotiate on specific topics.”

A bridge between worlds

While other faculties on campus have had similar roles for decades now, the ADCARA offers a new opportunity for Fine Arts.

“We haven’t had a role like this before, but I think it will allow people to have less work happening off the side of their desks — especially as the university becomes more of an interdisciplinary place where we work collaboratively across units,” McNally says.

“So, I do a lot around representation and acknowledgement of how research is viewed and defined on campus, including creative activity and creative works . . . . not everyone really understands what we do, how we do it and why it matters both on and off-campus.”

McNally in the CReaTe Lab

Describing the ADCARA role as being “exciting and very stimulating”, McNally feels it’s a logical step for him. “It fits well with my training as a recording engineer, who act as the intermediary between an artist and their audience, and help the audience receive the project in the way the artist intended — you’re like a bridge between two worlds, making connections for a specific outcome. Because of that, I really value opportunities to work across units on interdisciplinary projects . . . it just feels natural to collaborate with different talent while also getting the opportunity to learn about their activities.”

By way of example of how his position can function, McNally points to the November 2025 Science + Art = Actionevent featuring Swiss glaciologist Andreas Linsbauer of the University of Zurich.

“We had the Swiss Embassy approach [Crookes Professor] Sean Holman, who didn’t necessarily have the capacity to quickly organize anything mid-semester, so I was able to assist with making it happen.” As a result, Fine Arts joined with KULA and the Geography department to host an event bridging science, art, technology, education and climate change, attended by representatives from departments across campus. “It would have been very easy to say ‘we’re just too busy right now’, but then we wouldn’t have had this opportunity, and all those people wouldn’t have been in the room. Instead, we were able to showcase Fine Arts research and activity, and advocate for future collaboration.”

2025’s Science + Art = Action event

Giving back and catching up

While his ADCARA duties are in addition to his ongoing role with the School of Music, McNally sees them less as a burden and more as an opportunity.

“This institution has supported my growth and development for the past 20 years, so I see this as one way of giving back towards what’s been a very positive experience for me,” he says. “Before I was hired, for example, there was no CReaTe Lab in Music, but now there’s so much activity in there and that space will continue to grow in the years ahead.”

He also feels the ADCARA position will help better frame Fine Arts for the UVic of the future. “Since I was hired in 2006, we’ve certainly seen an increase in UVic’s profile as a research campus,” he says. “Not having had a role like this until now, we’re playing a lot of catch-up to convince people where we are in research and creative activity. But we’ve done amazing things lately.”

Over the past five years, some of those “amazing things” include the hiring in Visual Arts of Canada Research Chair Joel Ong, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices Heather Igloliorte and the elevation of Carey Newman from the limited term Audain Professor to UVic’s Impact Chair in Indigenous Art Practices. Meanwhile, the Black Scholar Fund  has enabled Fine Arts to bring in the likes of professors Lauren McCall in Music and Wayde Compton in Writing, while the Indigenous Recruitment Support Fund attracted professors Mique’l Dangeli (AHVS) and Marion Newman (Music). And, as recently as January 2026, we’ve seen Sarah Belle Reid join us as our newest Music technology professor.

But, as McNally points out, “when you’re coming in at those levels, there’s an expectation that there will also be capacity to facilitate activity and support people’s work, so that’s one of the ways this [ADCARA] role will help our faculty.”

Grad student support

Another bullet-point in the ADCARA brief is graduate student curriculum support, and development of new grad student initiatives and collaborations.

“This role will help to lighten the load of our Associate Dean Academic, so they’re not handling both undergrad and grad curriculum,” he says. “I also advocate for our graduate students with the Faculty of Graduate Studies to build greater opportunities and better support in forums where we traditionally had less presence.”

For examples, he points to the annual grad student Ocean Networks Canada ArtScience Fellowship and our Pacific Opera Victoria partnership. “It’s about finding opportunities when there’s a desire from a specific department, working in concert with them to help get things off the ground.”

Visual Arts grad student Parvin Hasani (left) was the 2025 ONC ArtScience Fellow

Coming up next

Looking ahead to this semester, McNally is particularly excited by the extended visit by Orion Scholar Mike Ananny, a communications and journalism professor with USC.

“He’s a highly respected academic: a former Trudeau Scholar and advisor to the federal Minister of Heritage, he was on the advisory committee for the future of CBC and Radio Canada . . . he’ll be really interesting for people to engage with, especially in this time of cultural sovereignty.”

During his three months in Fine Arts, Ananny will be specifically focused on the use of creative AI and its impacts on the arts, artists and creatives.

“Anyone who’s working with or contemplating creative AI, how it works, how it’s being used, how it’s affecting the sense of artistic self and identity across the creative field,” says McNally. “He’ll be giving a public Orion lecture plus offering curated workshops with our grad students and faculty.”

Planning for the future

Ultimately, McNally feels the ADCARA position nicely aligns with his own research and creative activity.

“The way I helped develop the music and technology program is similar to how the sciences build a lab: using grants to help a group of students work around aligned research objectives. I’ve also engaged with external communities and worked to bring them to campus through events like the Society for Music Production Research conference and the Audio+ series, which allow students to see their futures in the industry. Creating a culture of research is one of the goals of this position, so it’s about both seeing what’s possible and what people can aspire to.”

The Theatre department’s focus on applied theater is a good example of that: an emerging field just 30 years ago, UVic is now seen as a world leader thanks to the work of past professors like Warwick Dobson and Julianna Saxton, and current professors Yasmine Kandil and Kirsten Sadeghi-Yekta.

A more recent example is Visual Arts professor Heather Igloliorte’s Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab. “Look at who she’s brought in during the first year of her CERC position — people are literally coming here from all over the world because they’ve got connections with her and now they know what we’re doing here. This kind of work is driven by relationships and building relationships is one of the things we’re really good at in Fine Arts.”

Opening day for Heather Igloliorte’s  Taqsiquut Research Creation Lab in 2025

Robert Amos receives Honorary DFA

by | Nov 17, 2025 | Art History & Visual Studies, Award, News, Visual Arts, Writing

An artist, art historian, author and arts writer, Robert Amos has dedicated most of the past four decades to documenting — both journalistically and visually — Victoria’s visual arts scene, whether with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Times Colonist newspaper or in his own many books. But he has also spent over 15 years working with the Artist Archives in UVic’s Special Collections, making him an ideal choice to receive an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts during the Fall Convocation ceremony. As Dr. Cedric Littlewood, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, noted in his introduction, “By bringing people, buildings and neighbourhoods to life, Robert’s contributions to BC’s art history is the very fabric of Victoria’s history.”

“Art history isn’t all about the distant past: in fact, art history is all around us. If we reflect on and understand the times we live in, we may come to understand ourselves a bit better,” said  Amos during his 10-minute talk. “I’m passionate about sharing stories with students, art lovers and the general public and while the internet provides instantaneous global reach to any information we may want to look up, unless we who live and work here create and tell our own local stories, and find a way to preserve and safeguard those for the future, there won’t be anything there for anyone to look up and access.”

Amos noted how UVic students are surrounded by art, mentioning the Salish banners, sculptural panels, ceremonial furniture and pieces from the University Art Collection displayed across campus. “Art really is part of our life here on campus and it’s more than just decoration,” he said. “Art is a form of communication . . . and if you find a way to communicate the reality of your own time and place, history will be interested in what you have to say.”

Watch Robert’s convocation address here

Music welcomes new professor Sarah Belle Reid

by | Oct 31, 2025 | Faculty, News, School of Music

UVic’s School of Music is delighted to welcome Dr. Sarah Belle Reid as an assistant professor in technology starting January 2026. A performer-composer and pioneering artist in the field of electronic and electroacoustic music, Reid will bring her expertise in experimental performance, creative technology and innovative instrument design to our Music program.

“I’m really looking forward to joining the School of Music,” says Reid. “It’s an incredible opportunity to share my passion for electronic and electroacoustic music, explore new technologies for creative expression, and contribute to a space where we can all deepen our listening and sound-making practices together.”

With a background spanning technology, composition, and education, Reid brings a rare blend of artistry and technical insight to her teaching. Her approach to music-making emphasizes curiosity, experimentation, and empowerment through creative tools.

“One of the reasons I’m passionate about integrating technology into creative practice is that it gives artists a powerful sense of agency,” she explains.

“So much becomes possible when you can build and shape your own tools, systems, and processes. I want students to experience that sense of freedom and curiosity, and to create work that feels personal, alive, and adventurous—whether they’re designing a new instrument or controller for performance, building interactive installations, programming custom software tools, or creating dynamic modular synth patches.”

A performer-composer at the frontiers of sound

Sarah Belle Reid is a performer-composer who plays trumpet, modular synthesizer, and an ever-growing collection of handcrafted electronic instruments. Her music inhabits the intersections of contemporary classical music, experimental electronics, noise, and improvisation, offering audiences deeply immersive sonic experiences.

Find out more about her research in this Youtube video in which she takes an historical, technical and musical deep dive into the Buchla 100 Series Modular System —  the first voltage controllable modular synthesizer built by Don Buchla in the mid-1960s — now held at San Francisco’s Mills College Center for Contemporary Music.

Often praised for her ability to transport listeners through vivid sonic adventures, Reid’s work has been described as ranging from “graceful” and “danceable” to “silk-falling-through-space” and “pit-full-of-centipedes” (San Francisco Classical Voice).

Reid holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, where she focused on the development of new electronic instruments and musical notation systems as tools for exploring temporal perception and co-creation. She has previously held faculty positions at CalArts, Chapman University, and Temple University, teaching courses in music technology, physical computing, and electronic instrument design.

Welcome, Sarah Belle Reid — we look forward to the exciting sounds and ideas you’ll bring to the UVic School of Music community!

Distinguished Alumni Awards: Tania Willard

by | Mar 31, 2025 | Alumni, Award, donor, Graduate, indigenous, News, Visual Arts

We congratulate 2025 Presidents’ Alumni Award recipient Tania Willard, a mixed Secwépemc and settler artist whose research intersects with land-based art practices. A graduate of the Department of Visual Arts (BFA, 1998), the work of Kamloops-born Willard activates connection to land, culture and family, centring art as an Indigenous resurgent act, though collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery and support of language revitalization in Secwépemc communities. 

“I learned a lot about myself in [UVic’s] art program,” she says. “Four years is enough time to decide whether you are dedicated to art or you aren’t. I made it through that program, and knew it was still something I was passionate about. I also knew I wanted it to serve not only art for art’s sake but to widen it out to think about social engagement, think about activism, think about community—and that was through my Indigenous heritage as a Secwépemc person. In those days, there was a lot of activity on campus in music and art, in activism and in Indigenous rights, and I found my voice through those spaces.”

Currently based on the Neskonlith Indian Reserve, Willard’s artistic and curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2012-2014) and Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe (ongoing). Her work is included in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Forge Project NY, Kamloops Art Gallery, Belkin gallery and the Anchorage Museum, among others.

Her suggestion for current students and emerging artists? “Seek out Indigenous professors and students to support you,” she says. “I took Christine Welsh’s class—she was a Métis professor in Women’s Studies—and that was the first time in my life I had had an Indigenous teacher and that was a significant moment for me. And now it’s not as uncommon to have that experience. We have Indigenous faculty, I am Indigenous faculty, but at the time in my high school, my career and everything, I had never had that opportunity and that was important. I would encourage all students to seek out belonging and community and connection.”

An acclaimed career

In 2016, Willard received the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art. In 2020, the Shadbolt Foundation awarded her their VIVA Award for outstanding achievement and commitment in her art practice, and in 2022 she was named a Forge Project Fellow for her land-based, community-engaged artistic practice. In 2023 BUSH Gallery was named as a Future Studies recipient from Ruth Foundation for the Arts. Willard is a 2024 fellow with the Doris and Jack Shadbolt fellowship at Simon Fraser University. She is also an assistant professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan in syilx territories.

“Art can reach people in a way that’s different—it speaks a language that tries to connect with us in our hearts,” she says. “That’s been important for me. I don’t think it’s the only effective means. I think it can work alongside many other methods and practices, but for me it’s been the way that I can commit to because it nourishes, it communicates and it’s relational and it can deal with difficult subjects… [Art] helps me vision different outcomes. It’s a universal problem-solving technique. People use it in the sciences, in the humanities. We need that creativity no matter who we are to help us solve problems and nourish ourselves and grow.”

Speed round!

What I’d do with an extra hour of free time: 

“I would continue to work on basketry, which is also something I do that is relaxing and balances everything out.”

One food I can’t resist: 

“Smoked salmon.”

My go-to karaoke song: 

“I don’t do karaoke very often. However, I recently did karaoke for my friend Peter Morin’s art project, Love Songs to End Colonization. And I did a version of the Violent Femmes’ ‘Blister in the Sun.’ In the past I’ve also done the Clash’s ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’.”

My secret talent: 

“I won some dance contests when I was much younger.”

Skill I wish I possessed: 

“I wish I could do more construction, build more things… like lovely library-style bookshelves.”

Something great I’ve read recently: 

Let’s Become Fungal!: Mycelium Teachings and the Arts: Based on Conversations with Indigenous Wisdom Keepers, Artists, Curators, Feminists and Mycologists.

One cool thing about where I live: 

“I live on reserve, and I live near the forest edge. I love how the forest takes care of everything. Life, death, food, ecology. I have great respect and continue to learn every day of my life from how the forest takes care of things in a way that contrasts the ways we have to have systems for food, for garbage, for waste, and we build up these separate systems to take care of all that. But the forest innately does that.”

Read more about UVic’s 2025 Alumni Awards here

Distinguished Alumni Award winner: Chari Arespacochaga

by | Mar 27, 2025 | Alumni, Award, donor, Graduate, News, Theatre

Chari Arespacochaga is an acclaimed theatre director and educator at the College of Fine Arts at Florida State University (FSU) where she is the Director of the MFA Directing Program. Her theatrical direction credits include Rent, Kinky Boots (Short North Stage), The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (University of California), Amadeus and Stupid Kids (Phoenix Theatre, Victoria), 9 Minutes (for PopUP Theatrics NYC), Rock of Ages, The Full Monty, Disney’s Tarzan, Spring Awakening, Legally Blonde, Altar Boyz and Into the Woods, among others. At FSU, she initiated and designed Performing Climate Change, a course that provides students from different colleges and departments critical and creative ways of approaching the climate crises; and recently directed an acclaimed production of Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812.

The recipient of a 2025 Emerging Alumni Award, Chari graduated with an MFA from the Department of Theatre (2015), and her scholarship, artistic work and teaching is centred on theatre as necessary cultural work for social transformation and providing her audience and students new ways of engaging with theatre through the lens and lived experiences of an immigrant BIPOC artist-scholar. 

“My experiences at UVic solidified for me how making theatre coincides with making community,” she says. “It made me realize in concrete, palpable ways how we cultivate our life gets reflected in the work that I do as a theatre director and affects how I set up workplaces for people in making theatre. It also made me think about new ways we need to be creating stories and who else should we be inviting to the table to tell those stories.”

Born in the Philippines (Manila) but currently based in Tallahassee, Florida, Chari is in the process of adapting a series of stories about a culturally diverse group of princesses/superheroines called the Guardian Princesses into musicals for young audiences as part of her commitment to developing new works. Other developmental collaborations include a new musical called Missing and a feminist retelling of Macbeth entitled Em.

A scene from Amadeus, which Chari directed at UVic’s Phoenix Theatre in 2015

Unlearning process

Early influences include Sesame Street, Electric Company, movie musicals and Saturday morning cartoons. “I remember clearly those vignettes in Electric Company where Rita Moreno was running a film set and everything would be falling apart,” she recalls. “She was shooting something about a pirate on a ship and the mast would fall on them. And I thought that was great. Maybe, even then, I could recognize that’s probably stress I can deal with and thrive on.”

One of the key things she’s learned, however, is the ability to unlearn that there’s only one way of doing something. “That there’s only one way to rehearse, that there’s only one way to tell a story . . . I try to unlearn whatever I thought were those absolutes all the time. Some are easier to unlearn than others.”

“You’re teaching in a classroom, and you can prep and prep and you should have a plan, but it’s not about you. It needs to become about the students. I am running a rehearsal, but it’s not about me, it’s about the show. It’s about making the actors feel their best possible selves. It’s about making my creative collaborators, whether they’re designers or stage managers, feel like they have ownership of the show and the story that we’re telling.”

Power of story

Chari has long believed in the power of story to affect an audience. “I was always emotionally available to believing a story and letting it move me,” she says. “I remember crying the first time I watched Dumbo as a toddler. There was always a connection to how stories can move you and make you think about things… Story is a good way to change people’s minds. Even if you don’t change their mind in a moment, there’s enough power in the seed that it might plant so if even three or four people can ask a new question of themselves about how we deal with the world or how we live, I think that’s worth the telling of the story.”

Speed round!

Something that brings me joy: 

“A really good rehearsal. A moment when you recognize, ‘Oh, my students have grown up.’”

One food I can’t resist: 

“Some days it would be Japanese food, some days it would be something Spanish like Jamón or cheese. It’s very hard to resist cheese.”

A sport that I follow: 

“Does shopping count as a sport? Most recently, I was following women’s soccer because the MFA directing candidate I am mentoring was directing The Wolves, and that’s about a young female soccer team, so we were watching a lot of women’s soccer.”

My go-to karaoke song: 

“I’m Filipino and my absolute act of resistance is to not believe in karaoke. When we’re at a karaoke joint, I just say ‘It’s my day off, sorry.’”

Something great that I’ve watched or read recently: 

“I thought Wicked was pretty great. I am right now reading a lot about Sweeney Todd, which I think is a fantastic script and all the research accompanying it.”

Favourite place to travel: 

“New York City always feels like home to me. London is becoming a nice second home, and I have to say wherever the next show takes me becomes a favourite place to travel.”

 Read more about UVic’s 2025 Alumni Awards here